Howard Lectures

The Howard Foundation Lecture is an occasional series for which the Foundation invites a former Fellow to the Brown University campus for a public presentation in his or her area of expertise.

The first Howard Foundation lecture was delivered on October 8, 2009 by Robert A. Gross, The James L. and Shirley A. Draper Professor of Early American History at the University of Connecticut on "Helen Thoreau's Anti-Slavery Scrapbook: Abolitionism and Transcendentalism in Concord, Massachusetts." Professor Gross received a Howard Fellowship in 1988-89. A revised version of the lecture has since been published in the January 2012 issue of the Yale Review (Vol. 100, pp. 103-120).

The second Howard event was a public reading, co-sponsored by the Program in Literary Arts, by Shelley Jackson, who received a Howard Fellowship in 1998-99. Ms. Jackson read a new story "Monocerous" to a large and enthusiastic audience on December 7, 2010.

The Howard Foundation Lecture for 2011-2012 was delivered on March 1, 2012 by Leonard Barkan, Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton University on the topic: "What Kind of a Subject is Food?: Antiquity, Renaissance, and the Lives of a Symbolic Form." Professor Barkan was a Howard Fellow in 1987-88.